


The Orphan and the Apple

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Gyakuten Saiban | Ace Attorney
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-10
Updated: 2008-09-10
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:48:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's all fun and games until somebody breaks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Orphan and the Apple

-

 

One day, Apollo walks into her office to find her seated on top of her own papers and folders and memos, a toppled thing of paperclips by her folded knee. She doesn't open her eyes as he shrugs his backpack off onto the chair for clients and plops down beside it, like they're there for counseling, the boy and the backpack that didn't get along.

"Are you praying or something?" he goes, finally, because he's eleven and silence is too eerie for him.

Mia's eyes open, crinkle in the corners with her smile. "You could call it that," she says in her ambiguous way, the manner he's come to expect from lawyers, the answer that is neither yes nor no. She goes back to it; she's wearing pants today, so Mia Fey on her desk with her legs folded criss-cross applesauce isn't as obscene as the image suggests.

Apollo shrugs, fishes around in his backpack for a paperback with little strips of its spine peeling away.

He wasn't due for an appointment today, and he knows Mia knows it, but she doesn't comment on it and this is why he likes her so much.

 

****

 

"It's something we used to do, back home," she tells him some other time, sitting in the concrete garden outside Pizza My Heart, watching him shuffle around in diagonal lines on the back of a skateboard. The ends of her scarf kick in the breeze, the same color as buttermilk. "We used to sit under the waterfalls so cold it turned us numb, and meditate. All of us girls learned to do it before we learned to read and write."

"Sounds like child abuse," says Apollo, leaning a little bit and almost losing his balance when the skateboard responded, turning in a slow semi-circle; his arms pinwheeled, but he didn't fall off. He says the words without a second thought to how they felt on his tongue, because he grew up in an orphanage (only they didn't call it that. They called it a Rehabilitation Center, but everyone who lived there knew what it was. You can call it a no-kill shelter to make it seem better, but a pound is still a pound.) and phrases like "child abuse" and "abandonment" were as common there as, "what's for dinner?" "Shouldn't you guys be doing something about that?"

She laughs at him, covering her lips with her fingertips, little reflexes of her old culture ghosting up her muscles. "And I think you should be a lawyer someday, a mouth like that."

"I won't," he assures her, as the skateboard slips out from under him like a bar of soap. He lands flat on his butt. Winces, gets up slowly, chases after the board. Comes back with it tucked under one arm like a textbook and smiles at her with eyes too round. "I don't like fighting."

"Okay, then," she says charitably enough. She wipes the pizza grease off her fingers onto the paper towel in her lap. "How's this, then? Why on earth do you put so much gel in your hair? It's not attractive."

"I know," he replies, with entirely more self-awareness than any eleven-year-old has any right to possess. She remembers being similar. "That's why people turn to look."

 

****

 

The second time they made him trudge downtown to go talk to her, she met him in the lobby of her business building and told him, "I don't want to deal with these idiots today."

They went to the mall. Apollo felt the tingle go down to the palms of his hands; he rarely ever got to go to the arcade here. They used to have little hand-held game consoles at the orphanage, but they kept mysteriously disappearing, so the only thing they had were board games. Apollo knew the fold of every card in the deck, he knew which letters were missing from Scrabble, he knew exactly when Mr. Mustard did it in the laboratory with the wrench. His brain was already hard-wired for words, for logic tricks. He wanted to play a computer, wanted the impersonal race of mathematics and pixels.

Mia stopped by a display of perfume, each carefully advertised by a faceless model of the opposite gender of whoever was supposed to be buying the scent. She picked up a sample, spritzed it on her wrist, right above the cuff of her blazer, and sniffed it like one would sniff a line of gunpowder.

"Smells like ass," she decided, extending her wrist for his opinion.

Before he could give it, a helpful employee cropped up beside them. "Are you finding everything you need today?" he inquired politely, as if he seriously doubted it. He'd heard her comment.

Mia turned to him, her face going smooth like glass, unreadable as still, deep water. "Are you serious? You can find _everything_ you need here?" She looked very carefully at the rows and rows of bottles. "Hm. No, I'm not finding everything I need. I think you should re-evaluate your efficiency."

Leaving the employee scrambling for his dignity, she walked away, around the displays meant to make her stop and look, and Apollo followed on her heels.

He forgot about the arcade. That was better than beating Galaxy Quest, any day.

 

***

 

He tries to get her to buy him something once, just to see if she would do it.

She looks at him patiently, her eyes dancing in a way that was not condescending, but not kind. "Why should I?" she asks. "No one's going to be that nice to you when you're my age, not even if you're pretty and you ask nicely."

Christmas was only two weeks away then, and he's surprised to find something with his name on it under the tree, something with Mia's careful script curling along the edge of the package, _And every child deserves to have something nice done for him once in his life, just so he knows that people care._

After that, he stops complaining about having to go see her.

 

****

 

Then comes the day he realizes he's going to flunk out of math for the third year in a row, and he goes to her office, ready for her simple encouraging smile and her easy way with words, to remind him that he doesn't need math, not really; what use are polygons when it's polysyllables he can manipulate in the same easy way charcoal smears under his fingers?

He finds her with the curtains drawn, a bottle of Smirnoff dangling between her fingers. Her eyes flicker to him, and remain there, a steady pressure like a headache. She doesn't put the bottle away and she doesn't wave him off. She just watches him to see what he'll do.

So he sits, backpack still on his back, butt on the edge of his chair.

"My little sister dropped out of school," she informs him, bluntly. "She's living with her so-called friends in San Francisco."

"Oh," he bobs his head sympathetically, isn't sure what to say. He has a hard time adding "older sister" to the little strips of identity he's pegged to her. "How old is she?"

"Fifteen."

He nods again. There are four years separating him and Mia's sister. Too much for them to have anything in common. He sits still and watches her; there's still liquid in the bottom of her glass, but she refrains from fishing it out. Funny; it looks exactly like water, but Apollo can smell it from where he's sitting, sharp and acrid and his stomach recoils even though he's never been allowed near alcohol in his entire life. He just knows it kills people. He looks at Mia like she's a headstone.

Mia keeps staring at him. She opens her mouth a few times. She fiddles with the charm at her neck. She looks like she might cry, but then her eyes go steely, like they had in the mall, cold and clear like ice.

Finally, she tosses back the rest of her drink, and when her gaze returns to him, she says, "I wonder what your Achilles' heel will be, when it's your success story. When it's your turn."

 

****

 

The very first meeting, he looked at her in defiance and he asked, "Do you pity me?"

And she'd answered, "No. My boyfriend just died and somehow, opening up my own law firm doesn't keep me busy enough. There. That's my story. What's yours, kid?"

 

 

****

 

Many years later, Apollo wonders who the sessions helped more, the boy who never had any parents who could hurt him or disappoint him, or the orphan who defended everybody because nobody had defended her.

They'd met through an inter-city program, aimed to inspire kids in helpless, bleak kinds of situations by having them meet up with a local role model who could show them what life is like when you push yourself to succeed.

The Powers that Be in the program liked Mia Fey. They liked the idea of a village girl, ignorant and dressed in purple broadcloth, crawling out from under her backwards, superstitious rock to come down to the real world and become an overnight prodigy in law. They actually said that, as if "overnight" meant "months and months of manual labor in Mr. Grossberg's smelly, cluttered office with no to little pay and wondering if your mother was dead somewhere in a ditch." Mia bit her lip and said nothing, letting these people believe in their rainbows and spout sunshine out of their rear ends.

Then she met Apollo Justice, and he could see Psyche-Locks.

He didn't know he could, of course, just like he didn't know he could do a lot of things. These kinds of kids, she learns fast, the more time she spends in court with Miles Edgeworth's eyes burning and crumbling around the edges like pages in a fire and seeing herself in him, almost never know what they can do because nobody has ever told them.

Mia looks at him, slouched down in the chair on the other side of her desk, and she thinks of Maya, flighty and aimless and content to always let other people take care of her, and she thinks if she can give this boy direction, then she can do the same for her sister.

 

****

 

"I don't get it," says Apollo instantly, leaning against the doorframe and watching Phoenix sit on top of the desk in the front lobby of Fey and Co Law Offices, bobbing his head away to something on his mp3 player. He's supposed to be organizing and shelving Mia's many law books, but he has one open on his lap, his eyes racing back and forth like he's reading code; the rest are stacked into forgotten heaps on every side of him.

He turns back around. "I don't get it," he says again, obviously thinking hard. "How come she got away with it? Anyone looking at the facts could see what the truth was: she killed that man! She killed her stepsister! She killed your boyfriend! It's the truth!"

Her lips twitch with a smile, making the mole on her upper lip jump like somebody had shocked it. "You'll find that witnesses are the most unreliable evidence you can have, Apollo. There is truth in cold things like fingerprints, in things like blood. But when it comes to people..." she shakes her head.

He frowns at her. "But there's only one truth, isn't there?"

She pushes her chair back so she can rummage through the drawers of her desk. She pulls out a handheld mirror, the kind with a wobbly, cheap plastic handle that you can get at the drugstore. As he comes around to sit down in his usual spot, she holds it out so that it's equal distance from the both of them.

"What do you see?" she asks him.

He eyes her, trying to gauge if it was a trick question. "The room?" he guesses.

"Right. That's what I see too. But what I see is completely different from what you see. So which is the right one? What's the truth? We can't both be right." His eyes cut to her again, knowing without saying that there could be no answer. "The mirror doesn't care. The mirror's only reflecting what's in front of it. But you and I see it differently and we're never going to see the same picture, not even if we switch places."

She puts the mirror away. "That's the trouble with witnesses. That's the trouble with the Hawthorne case. You can shake these people until their brains rattle inside their heads like walnuts, but they're only ever going to see their own versions of the truth, their own variation on what happened, and nothing you say is going to change that. And really, what is it but _your_ idea of the truth? What if my truth is no more an exaggeration of details than theirs?"

His lip curls up. She looks at him and laughs a sad little laugh that reminds him of the way the ice clinked at the bottom of her glass of vodka.

"It's all fun and games," says Apollo, legs swinging above the floor, his shoelaces untied. "Until someone breaks."

 

****

 

He never did get a chance to meet Maya Fey.

 

****

 

 

Trucy comes trudging towards them through the headstones. The toes of her boots are splattered with mud, and her hands are empty. There's a gravestone further up the hill that has no name on it; it's just a simple statue that looks extremely similar to a rook from a game of chess. Trucy uses it to pay respects to her parents, since neither of them have their own graves she can visit, obviously.

Apollo looks down at the headstone he's sitting on, unconsciously fiddles with the attorney's badge in his lapels.

"I think we were all a little bit in love with her," says Phoenix softly, as if he can read exactly what he was thinking.

The graveyard is beautiful on Sundays.

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
